“Itinerancy and Alterity: Informal Economy and Livelihood of Immigrants in Public Spaces – A Case Study on Street Vending in Berlin and New York”

Starting point of my research is street vending in Berlin. There are entrepreneurs of Turkish provenience selling souvenirs at Friedrichstrasse, jewelry vendors from Latin America at Alexanderplatz and many other micro scale entrepreneurs who sell snacks, newspapers and other goods. While moving daily around and working on urban streets and places, they are trying to secure their economic survival. Altogether they form a marginal economy, whose subjects are immigrants coming very often from the periphery of a globalised world.
Such scenes of everyday life depict glocalised spaces of social-cultural encounter and display the density of globalisation in Western metropolises. Furthermore these scenes refer to the problematic relationship between the use of urban space, work, migration, illegalisation and precarity. Against this background my research examines on an empirical level the function of street vending in Berlin and its relationship to the ethnicization of informal economies and urban spaces, and their meaning for local urban development policies. To contextualize the status of urban street vending in Western industrialised countries New York will be drawn in comparison.
Itinerant street vending is often characterised by its regular, but as well spontaneous use of urban space, which is an essential part of the urban and not embodied by planning and architecture. Street vending as a marginal(ised) practice to appropriate public space is characterised by informality which involves chances and risks. Informal economies gain in importance in Western metropolises, due to the process of globalisation and post-fordist transformation of labour, and will therefore raise important questions on the social, cultural and spatial level.
Answers will be developed within this project alongside of three aspects of examination:

the first one deals with local institutions and their regulatory practices and policies regarding the use of public space and their impact on street vending

the second aspect explores the precarious working conditions of the street entrepreneurs from their own perspective

the third aspect explores forms and practices of spatial use and spatial appropriation of street vending

By addressing these questions valuable indications will be provided to answer the question how public space is transformed through informal use and to what extent the city is a place of social integration. Public space adopts new meanings, when the limitations of urban membership to the local solidarity association is negotiated by processes of immigration. Therefore, the analysis of street vending raises the question whether public space can be made useful to secure the livelihood of immigrants and urban poor. The project aims to identify potentials of urban informal economies for the future of the post-fordistic metropolis and discusses possibilities of integration and participation of street vendors in local urban development processes.

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I just came across your site, while I am preparing a syllabus for a planning studio on street vendors in NYC for next spring. I am an Adjunct Professor at Columbia for Planning and Urban Design. I would love to get in touch to hear more about your research. Maybe we could get you here for a presentation?